Fairfax couple helps illustrate and republish early Kay Ryan poems

Long before Kay Ryan was a successful poet, let alone the Poet Laureate of the United States, she practiced her craft by writing short poems about odd things she read in "Ripley's Believe It or Not!"

Begun in 1918, "Ripley's Believe It or Not!" was a syndicated newspaper cartoon feature of bizarre events and unusual feats and facts. Collections of them were published in dozens of paperback editions over the decades.

"I had this 1930s volume that I would open to a page at random, and whatever story appeared, I would write a poem about it," Ryan recalled, speaking from her Fairfax home. "And what happened was that I got very fond of this. Over 10 years, I wrote hundreds of them."

In 2002, Ryan teamed with her friends, Fairfax artists Carl and Marie Dern, on a limited edition, hardback collection of 15 of the best of Ryan's "Believe it or Not!" poems. The book has now been reprinted as a mass market paperback.

"To me, these Ripley's stories are terrifically funny, but they're not just funny; they have pathos, they have a human dimension in comic form," Ryan explained. "I discovered that I didn't want to focus on the bizarre, the grotesque, the extreme or the incredible. What I really enjoyed was humdrum-atizing them. I liked taking a cartoon and then warming it. But I didn't know that right away. I had to look at 100 of them to see that's what I'd done."

Titled "Ripley's Believe It or Not!," the original hand-bound collection was designed by Marie, who set the type by hand and printed the pages on the letterpress in her studio. Carl illustrated the book with whimsical watercolor drawings.

"Kay's poems are like sketches," Carl said. "It's not that they're simple and that she doesn't spend a lot of time doing them, but they're like sketches in literature and poetry. I thought of them that way when I was doing the drawings. And they're lighthearted, so I felt lighthearted drawings would go along with them."

To illustrate a poem about a French peasant with two noses, Dern drew a cartoon character in a beret standing in profile, looking at himself in a mirror. You see his nose and he sees another in his reflection: two noses.

"I like Kay's humor, and I tried to interject some of my own," he said.

Only 125 cloth bound, fine art copies, priced at $225, were made in the original edition, aimed at collectors of artists' books.

But everyone concerned believed the charming little collection had obvious mass market potential - especially after Ryan was named U.S. Poet Laureate in July.

"Marie and Carl and I felt it was a book that more people would buy it if it could be brought down to a cheaper trade paperback price," Ryan recalls.

They discussed this at a window table at the Koffee Klatch in Fairfax, which served as their office and conference room, and decided to move ahead with their populist paperback.

"Kay said, 'I'm going to be famous for 15 minutes, so let's take advantage of it,'" Marie giggles. "'She said, 'Now that I can, that's what I want to do.' I thought that was pretty wonderful. So that's what we did."

Retitled "The Jam Jar Lifeboat & Other Novelties Exposed," after one of Ryan's poems, the collection was just published in trade paperback by Red Berry Editions, a new company founded by Marie Dern and her partner in the venture, Jane Downs. They hired a Canadian company to print 1,000 copies in its first edition, priced at $20 each.

The title poem was inspired by a Ripley's entry about "a man named Bateman" who invented a jam jar lifeboat in 1831, insisting it was unsinkable. Unfortunately for him, it wasn't.

Ryan's poem:

It was quixotic to think

the cold gray North Atlantic

might be survived in a jam jar boat.

It is not enough that one of something

can be made to float with its lid sealed tight.

One rat might survive one night

on a single treadmill bottle

but even that would be a battle.

Bateman always hated how small truths

extrapolated so poorly. He came up with

really good small ones almost hourly.

"I found myself feeling a lot of compassion, an amused sympathy for the people in Ripleys'," Ryan said. "So many of us have so many good ideas that just don't extrapolate. This guy thought he could hook a bunch of jam jars together and make a cool lifeboat. So he puts it in the North Sea and it sinks immediately.

After taking a moment to reflect on the Bateman in all of us, she said:

"He's just so sad because he has tons of little inspirations and ideas that turn out so poorly. They're little tragedies, really. And we humans love great failures. These poems are generally funny, but they're also tender. And it's a tenderness I really enjoy. There's an affection for humans I'm quite pleased with."